I'm writing a shell script that needs to download some data from the Internet and I was just thinking if I can rely on cURL that it's pre-installed on all Unix distributions.
I know that wget is not on OS X by default but cURL is. I also remember me installing cURL on Ubuntu Server but it's already a year or two. I tried Ubuntu Server 12.04 today and it comes with cURL out of the box.
Is cURL standard part of all Unix-like operating systems
curlunix
Best Answer
Everything else equals I would say it being more likely that you have wget installed.
Yet, why not simply make a conditional, looking for both wget and curl in the PATH, and use whatever is available, if any? If you want to be ambitious, also feel free to through in lynx, w3m, etc in the mix.